1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to methods of fabricating flash memory cards.
2. Description of the Related Art
The strong growth in demand for portable consumer electronics is driving the need for high-capacity storage devices. Non-volatile semiconductor memory devices, such as flash memory storage cards, are becoming widely used to meet the ever-growing demands on digital information storage and exchange. Their portability, versatility and rugged design, along with their high reliability and large capacity, have made such memory devices ideal for use in a wide variety of electronic devices.
One exemplary standard for flash memory cards is the so-called SD flash memory card. The SD (Secure Digital) Card is a secure flash memory about the size of a postage stamp. Jointly developed by SanDisk, Toshiba and Matsushita Electronic, the SD Card weighs approximately two grams and is used for memory storage in a wide variety of digital products, including for example digital music players, cellular phones, handheld PCs, digital cameras, digital video camcorders, smart phones, car navigation systems and electronic books.
In the past, electronic devices such as SD cards have included an integrated circuit system consisting of several individually packaged integrated circuits each handling different functions, including logic circuits for information processing, memory for storing information, and I/O circuits for information exchange with the outside world. The individually packaged integrated circuits have been mounted separately on a substrate such as a printed circuit board to form the integrated circuit system. In older SD Cards including individually packaged components on a printed circuit board, the printed circuit board took up all or almost all of the available space within the card. The printed circuit board was formed to that size in order to contain all of the individually. packaged components. More recently, system-in-a-package (“SiP”) and multichip modules (“MCM”) have been developed where a plurality of integrated circuit components have been packaged together to provide a complete electronic system in a single package. Typically, an MCM includes a plurality of chips mounted side by side on a substrate and then packaged. An SiP typically includes a plurality of chips, some or all of which may be stacked on a substrate and then packaged.
Integrated circuits are typically batch processed on a panel and then singulated into individual packages upon completion of the fabrication process. Several methods are known for singulating the semiconductor packages having irregular or curvilinear shaped edges from a panel of encapsulated integrated circuits. Known cutting methods include, for example, water jet cutting, laser cutting, water guided laser cutting, dry media cutting and diamond coated wire cutting. Such cutting methods are able to achieve sophisticated rectilinear and/or curvilinear shapes of the individualized integrated circuit packages. While these methods are effective at achieving curvilinear and irregular shapes in individualized semiconductor packages, these methods require precision cutting, and add complexity and cost to the semiconductor fabrication process.